A curator at the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum who kept child pornography on his work computer is facing a mandatory minimum sentence of at least a year in jail.

Franz Klingender quietly pleaded guilty earlier this year to possessing and distributing child pornography and is now undergoing a sexual behaviour assessment while awaiting sentencing.

Klingender, 59, admitted to possessing 14,000 child pornography images and videos, but a prosecutor said that was only a portion of the material seized by police from the historian’s computers.

“Police confirm that hundreds of CDs were seized that contain child pornography but that isn’t even included in the 14,000 total just because there comes a point in time it just isn’t useful to continue going through that sort of stuff,” said assistant Crown attorney Mark Holmes.

Klingender was arrested in July 2013 as he prepared to board a plane for an academic conference in Britain. The prosecutor said Klingender had come to the attention of police in Anchorage, Alaska, after they received information in August 2012 from the Internet search engine company Google. That investigation led them to an IP address of a computer at the Canada Museum of Science and Technology on Lancaster Road that was being used by Klingender.

Following his arrest, police executed search warrants on computers at Klingender’s home and office and discovered the child pornography.

There was also evidence that Klingender had been downloading and trading images for at least six years. The prosecution filed into evidence 36 pages of emails between Klingender and other “like minded individuals” that dated back to 2010. Holmes said child pornography was being distributed from an email account bearing Klingender’s name.

“The police have discovered images that Mr. Klingender would have downloaded as early as calendar year 2007 and there is evidence of him reviewing, at the very least, if not distributing these images, just days or a week prior to the execution of a search warrant in July 2013,” said the prosecutor.

A sample of the type of material that police found will be shown to the judge during Klingender’s upcoming sentencing hearing.

Officials from the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corporation said at the time of his arrest that Klingender would sometimes make presentations to visitors but it wasn’t his primary responsibility. Klingender didn’t have much interaction with children and the museum previously said police told them that there was no reason to believe visitors or employees of the museum were in danger.

A spokesman for the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corp. said Klingender was fired last year following an internal investigation. Klingender began work at the museum in January 1999.